The Vitamin Protocol

Marcus arranged the vitamins in his palm with surgical precision—Vitamin D for the hollow spaces in his bones, Vitamin B12 for the neural pathways that seemed to fray with each passing year. At 47, he'd become a connoisseur of his own decay.

"You're taking those again?" Elena leaned against the doorframe, her silhouette cutting a sharp line through the morning light. She'd lost weight. Her collarbones protruded like fragile questions.

"They help," he said, swallowing them dry.

They both knew they didn't.

The baseball game played on mute in the background—some spring training match that meant nothing to anyone except gamblers and the desperately hopeful. Marcus remembered when Elena would sit with him, tracking statistics with the intensity of a mathematician, explaining the geometry of a pitch like it was sacred geometry. Now she only watched when she thought he wasn't looking.

The dossier had arrived three days ago. Not from an employer, but from a private detective Elena had hired. A spy in his own marriage, reading about himself in stark, uncompromising paragraphs: dinners alone, hours spent staring at nothing, the gradual retreat into rituals of self-preservation. The vitamin regimen. The baseball games he watched alone. The Sphinx-like quality he'd developed—inscrutable, ancient, worn down by time and weather.

"We need to talk," she said.

Marcus nodded. He knew what came next. The conversation they'd been postponing like some unpleasant medical procedure. His secrets weren't infidelities or gambling debts—they were simpler and more devastating. He'd simply ceased being the person she'd married. The slow erosion of self, one vitamin at a time.

"I hired someone," she said. "I needed to know what was happening inside you."

Marcus felt something crack open in his chest, not quite pain but something raw and newborn. "And?"

"And he said you're lonely," she said. "And that you're waiting for me to notice."

The baseball game flickered—some player hit a home run, the crowd rising as one collective organism. Marcus had forgotten how to be part of the crowd. He'd become a monument to his own caution.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I've been... trying not to disappear."

Elena crossed the room and took his hand. "Start by telling me the truth. Not about affairs. About whatever this is."

So he began. Not with grand confessions, but with small ones. The vitamins weren't working. The baseball was just noise. And the sphinx wasn't inscrutable—she was just tired.

"Let's start over," she said. "No vitamins. No secrets."

Outside, the spring sun rose over the city like an uncertain promise.